The dogs are, of course, great. I'll have some pictures of them later on. It only took me a few days to learn all of the names of the adults, but I'm not even going to try to bother with the 19 puppies we have until most of them go off to their new homes. I'll get to know the ones that are sticking around.
New Hampshire is a gorgeous place. I'd forgotten how nice it was here, and I'm slightly amazed that it didn't make more of an impression the last time I was here. I have to assume that the pressure and stress of EMT cram school was keeping my mind off of things like local scenery and culture, so I'm glad I made the decision to come out this way a second time.
The state very much lives up to its motto: Live Free or Die. It's almost astonishing. There's no state income tax, there's no general sales tax. To buy a gun, all you have to do is walk into the store with enough money. No license, no permit, no questions. That seems to be the general attitude here; people are left alone to do what they want so long as it hurts no one else. I'm seriously thinking about abandoning my plans to go on to Alaska and just stay here instead. I see no reason why I'd want to leave.
Amusingly, there are no less than three Wal-Marts within a 20 minute drive of Ashland, one to the north, south and west (with a mountain to the east, where no one's built anything at all). The people are perfect Wal Mart shoppers. There's no doubt that it's rural country living around here. The women my age are fat, unmarried mothers or some combination of the two. The men are rough and pride themselves both on hard labor and on their beards in equal measure. Plymouth, just up the highway from me, is a college town and manages to get a little more diversity and urban influences which is a bit of a relief.
While driving down to the nearest GameStop to get myself a copy of the newest zombie horror splatterfest game Left 4 Dead, I drove past a big place featuring bowling, bingo and I couldn't tell what else. The name, Fun Spot, tickled some faint memory in my head and it took me a minute to remember where I'd heard of the place before.
Months ago, I'd watched a documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters", a story about two men and their epic battle to hold the record of the high score on the ancient arcade game Donkey Kong. In the course of the movie, these two men, as well as everyone else who was anyone at all in the high-stakes world of retro arcade gaming high score record holding, converged on a certain video arcade in New Hampshire because it was, by some decree, the Mecca of their world and the only recognized place where a score could be observed, recorded and declared official.That place was Fun Spot in Weirs Beach, NH. 20 minutes down the road from me. For anyone who knows me, well... you know what this means. I had to stop and go inside. I had to see the machine that Steve Wiebe had busted Billy Michell's score on.
The scene inside was surreal. I kept telling myself that it probably wasn't the place, that maybe there was a whole chain of Fun Spots around the state or maybe I had misrembered the name or conflated it with the name of the GameStop I was heading towards. But sure enough, sitting in the very same spot it was in the movie was Donkey Kong game.
And someone was playing it. So ended my hope of giving it a shot.I decided instead to take a look around at the rest of the place. Memories came flooding back to me as I passed among these ancient games from the 1980's; memories of playing each and every one of them when they were new, when I could cajole my parents to take me to this arcade or that or filch a few quarters to run down to the resort game room. And clearly I wasn't the only one, and clearly the documentary had not overstated the importance of Fun Stop to the retro arcade gaming community. Here I passed someone setting up a camera on a tripod to record his perfomance in Quartet - the video proof needed to challenge a high score record. There I passed three guys sitting around just talking about the finer points of Frogger. And there, someone else set up on his laptop checking the current score records online. And everywhere, guys standing at their chosen games playing round after round and getting just a little bit better each time.
Me, I spent $3 on Xenophobia, snapped a few pictures and walked back out. I had a new game to play, after all. No one made zombie games in the 80's.
